All Your Base Are Belong To Us

December 31, 2012

I'm very happy to announce that the call for papers is now open for the next SELA Developers Practice! Our last conference has been a huge success, with over 1350 registered attendees and a number of workshops that we had to duplicate due to high demand. We want our next conference to be even bigger -- and you can be a part of it!
We are looking for breakout sessions (60-75 minutes) as well as full-day workshops covering any topic related to the Microsoft stack -- from Windows 8 to Windows Phone and Windows Azure, WCF and Entity Framework, ASP.NET...

December 26, 2012

Scheduler scripts are a very recent addition to Windows Azure Mobile Services. This is a very nice feature that supports periodic background processing in your mobile service. As a reminder, in the original release of Windows Azure Mobile Services, the only opportunity to run any server-side work (in scripts) is when the client performs an operation on a table (select, insert, update, or delete). For any kind of periodic processing, you'd have to use an external solution or have a client ping one of your tables -- a very ugly solution, as opposed to a scheduled script.
When would you...

December 24, 2012

Windows Azure Mobile Services (WAMS) is probably the most exciting Microsoft technology I have encountered in the last 5 years at least. This is a cross-platform framework that serves as a backend for your mobile applications, taking care of concerns such as data access and storage, user authentication, and push notifications. WAMS is the logical next step after PaaS offerings: it is a complete backend-as-a-service, which takes care of most (if not all) your server-side needs.
For a general introduction to Windows Azure Mobile Services, I recommend that you take a look at the Windows Azure Developer Center, or --...

Windows AzureConf was last month, and it was a blast! This was a virtual conference streamed online on Channel 9 and focused exclusively on Windows Azure, with Scott Guthrie delivering the keynote and the rest of the talks given by Azure community members -- Azure Insiders and Azure MVPs.
My first talk was about Windows Azure Mobile Services, which is the piece of Microsoft technology I am most excited about in the last 5 years at least. If you haven't seen this technology, Windows Azure Mobile Services provides a backend for your mobile apps on a variety of platforms, currently...